1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a vehicle external environment recognition device that identifies a specific object to which an object within a detection area corresponds.
2. Related Art
There are conventionally known a technique, such as collision avoidance control, which detects specific objects including another vehicle located ahead of a vehicle and avoid a collision with a leading vehicle (e.g.,), and a technique, such as a cruise control, which controls so as to maintain a distance between a vehicle and a leading vehicle at a safe distance (for instance, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2012-194864).
Such front monitoring techniques for a vehicle may be useful for avoiding and alleviating a minor collision not only with a leading vehicle but with a rushing-out pedestrian. Since the rushing-out pedestrian may suddenly appear into a detection area from various directions unlike the leading vehicle, time after the pedestrian appeared ahead of the vehicle until the vehicle approaches the pedestrian is short in many cases. Thus, an operator's momentary looking-aside, a slight delay of operation, etc. may greatly influence the occurrence of the minor collision. Therefore, expectations for the collision avoidance control described above have been increasing.
Meanwhile, if a malfunction event of the collision avoidance control, for instance, an event where the control erroneously recognizes an object to be a pedestrian and applies a brake to the vehicle occurs, the vehicle operator may distrust the collision avoidance control. Therefore, it is desired to achieve collision avoidance control which can avoid a minor collision accurately and quickly but without malfunctions.
For instance, JP-A No. 2008-45974 discloses a technique that uses as a feature vector the contour of an object contained in images acquired by imaging devices and to perform pattern matching with contour geometric models prepared in advance, thereby improving the accuracy of identifying the pedestrian.
However, as described above, the malfunction must be avoided in the collision avoidance control. Accordingly, when an object (pedestrian) enters into the detection area of the imaging device(s), a long period of time is required to identify the object to be a pedestrian as a result of determining that the appearance of the object matches with a contour geometric model of the pedestrian.